I hate this comic because it is profoundly lazy, and I hate it when people hand-wave away meaningful security advances with it.
Hitting people with wrenches leaves marks that can be shown to the media and truth & reconciliation commissions. Wetwork and black-bagging dissidents leaves records: training, operational, evidence after the fact. And it hardly scales – no matter what the powers at be want you to think, I think history shows there are more Hugh Thompsons than Oskar Dirlewangers, even if it takes a few years to recognize what they've done.
If we improve security enough that our adversaries are _forced_ to break out the wrenches, that's a very meaningful improvement!
https://xkcd.com/538/
I hate this comic because it is profoundly lazy, and I hate it when people hand-wave away meaningful security advances with it.
Hitting people with wrenches leaves marks that can be shown to the media and truth & reconciliation commissions. Wetwork and black-bagging dissidents leaves records: training, operational, evidence after the fact. And it hardly scales – no matter what the powers at be want you to think, I think history shows there are more Hugh Thompsons than Oskar Dirlewangers, even if it takes a few years to recognize what they've done.
If we improve security enough that our adversaries are _forced_ to break out the wrenches, that's a very meaningful improvement!
OK sure, but you don't really need to scale, just find the one guy with $500,000,000 in BTC that you want and hit him.
1 reply →